Linking atmospheric, terrestrial and aquatic environments: Regime shifts in the Estonian climate over the past 50 years

Abstract

Climate change in recent decades has been identified as a significant threat to natural environments and human wellbeing. This is because some of the contemporary changes to climate are abrupt and result in persistent changes in the state of natural systems; so called regime shifts (RS). This study aimed to detect and analyse the timing and strength of RS in Estonian climate at the half-century scale (1966−2013). We demonstrate that the extensive winter warming of the Northern Hemisphere in the late 1980s was represented in atmospheric, terrestrial, freshwater and marine systems to an extent not observed before or after the event within the studied time series. In 1989, abiotic variables displayed statistically significant regime shifts in atmospheric, river and marine systems, but not in lake and bog systems. This was followed by regime shifts in the biotic time series of bogs and marine ecosystems in 1990. However, many biotic time series lacked regime shifts, or the shifts were uncoupled from large-scale atmospheric circulation. We suggest that the latter is possibly due to complex and temporally variable interactions between abiotic and biotic elements with ecosystem properties buffering biotic responses to climate change signals, as well as being affected by concurrent anthropogenic impacts on natural environments.

How Did the Late 1980s Climate Regime Shift Affect Temperature-Sensitive Fish Population Dynamics: Case Study of Vendace (Coregonus albula) in a Large North-Temperate Lake

“…The results of our study provide strong evidence of a link between a sudden collapse of vendace in Lake Peipsi in the late 1980s and a regional climate regime shift [13,49] which manifested itself in Estonia with a sharp warming in the late 1980s, mainly from the winter of 1988/1989 with coherent shift in air temperature, snow cover duration and specific runoff [48]. Our findings highlight the role of both summer and winter environmental conditions in controlling vendace abundance.…”

“…Other sensitive cool-water fish declining in the lake (e.g., burbot Lota lota and Peipsi whitefish Coregonus lavaretus maraenoides) are longer-lived than vendace and likely to respond more slowly to environmental change. We used a nearly nine-decade dataset on vendace commercial catches and lake surface water temperature (LSWT) parameters with the aim of clarifying the relationships between extreme weather events related to the late 1980s regional climate regime shift [48,49] and vendace catch dynamics in Lake Peipsi. The specific focus of our study was to identify the environmental variables most related to the collapse of the vendace population in Lake Peipsi by the turn of the 1980/1990 decade.…”

Towards Sustainable Soil Stabilization in Peatlands: Secondary Raw Materials as an Alternative

“…The first step of stabilization is prehomogenization that involves adding the components into the soil, further elaborating the final result of mass stabilization [72]. Stabilization provides additional challenges, where detailed studies of design, climate, and drainage require more comprehensive analysis [73,74].…”

Non-stationary analysis of water level extremes in Latvian waters, Baltic Sea, during 1961–2018

“…This regime shift may reflect abrupt changes in geostrophic winds in 1987/1988 (Soomere et al, 2015b) and surface-level winds in the 1980s (Keevallik and Soomere, 2014). The described process may also mirror massive evidence of regime shift in various abiotic variables in Estonia in 1989-1990 in biotic time series of bogs and marine ecosystems in 1990 (Kotta et al, 2018).…”